The State of the Beatles
This article originally appeared in Issue 11 of Crawdaddy in September/October, 1967
The Beatles are dead! Long live the Beatles! There they are, the metamorphosis complete, standing on the flowered grave of their former selves. There they are, in solid flesh, evidence as indisputable as the rock rolled away from the cave. There they are, in butterfly brilliance, their waxen images set nearby like the larva of a former life. Consider the implications. Is it true what acid can do?
One is tempted to call it a comeback. Throughout the winter, there was a sense of the inevitability of the downfall of the Beatles, highlighted by Lennon’s Christ comment. They’ve gone too far! They can’t go farther! And they said they were breaking up. Suddenly, with Sgt. Pepper, all this is over. The end became the beginning.
But it can’t be a comeback because they never left. Somehow, on the great pop pedestal of our time, right there in front of everyone, the Beatles metamorphosized. Like changing your clothes with utmost discretion in the middle of Piccadilly Circus. The Beatles have resolved the fact that they are the Beatles. It all seems so simple. Yet the agony and effort are apparent, cloaked with grace.
“The world is a stage,” Shakespeare said. And so did Emmett Grogan and so did George Harrison. “We’re the Beatles,” Harrison continued in an interview with Miles in the International Times, “and it’s a little scene that we’re playing, and we’re pretending to be Beatles like Harold
Wilson is pretending to be Prime Minister.” Nothing to get hung about. “The Queen’s the Queen,” Harrison said. “The idea that you wake up in the morning and it happens you’re Queen—it’s amazing, but you could all be Queens if you imagined it.” A lot of people in Britain imagine that they are the Queen. Nobody puts them down.
With all the relief of a trip resolved, the identity koan is realized. “And it really doesn’t matter if I’m wrong I’m right where I belong I’m right where I belong.” That must have been a flash! Wow. The Beatles are the Beatles. “Nothing had changed, it’s still the same. I’ve got nothing to say but it’s OK.” it was good news, and they were ready to share it with the world.
Thus Sgt. Pepper is first an introduction. “So may I introduce to you the act you’ve known for all these years.” Odd to meet an act you’ve known. They were hardly strangers: their voices as familiar as a mother’s, their faces on the shrines of the teenyboppers. And yet the introduction is valid, the acquaintance a surprise. Finally the Beatles have been properly introduced, and, with that foundation, a long friendship seems likely. The Beatles can surely count on valentines and bottles of wine when they’re sixty-four, and the world can count on the best they can do in the forty intervening years.
The introduction is the foundation of Sgt. Pepper. The rest is the castle. A lovely structure, the cornerstone copyrighted 1967. In a year or so it will probably be dated, quaint, a landmark; still guaranteed to raise a smile, but lacking the punch of the present. As Blonde on Blonde is now more memory than immediate. The albums have a great deal in common. Both are monuments; both are manifestos. Dylan was the model for the movement last summer, when the world had hardly heard of hippies. Sgt. Pepper may be the looking glass through which hippies can disappear.
As a manifesto, Sgt. Pepper is the reincarnation of the Pied Piper. (“You’re such a lovely audience. We’d love to take you home with us. We’d love to take you home.”) The language leaves no doubt. A direct escape appeal: “She is leaving home…She is having fun…Stepping outside, she is free.” A travel brochure: “Picture yourself in a boat on a river, with tangerine trees and marmalade skies.” Further: “I have to admit it’s getting better (can’t get much worse).” Further: “l get by with a little help from my friends.” Further: “I’d love to turn you on.” Finally: “A splendid time is guaranteed for all.”
So Sgt. Pepper is a recruiting officer. And the Beatles are Bodhisattvas. “We’re all together on this thing,” Harrison said. “We’re just part of it, and we’d like to get as many people who want to be a part of it with us. We’ve got to save them, because they’re all potentially divine.”
They only hint at an end, but they probe the means: “Try to realize it’s all within yourself, no one else can make you change. And to see you’re really only very small, and life flows on within you and without you.” That’s Harrison. Lennon and McCartney suggest means by example, and that is the primary power of the album. The Beatles have changed; Sgt. Pepper is the chronicle and the climax of that change: “Me used to be a angry young man, me hiding me head in the sand. You gave me the word, I finally heard, I’m doing the best that I can.” “Man I was mean, but I’m changing my scene and I’m doing the best that I can.” “I’m fixing a hole where the rain gets in and stops my mind from wandering where it will go.” You can change too.